Maureen Dowd

At the New York Times, Maureen Dowd is outraged at what she calls Chelsea Clinton's "cashing in to help feed the rapacious, gaping maw of Clinton Inc." Here's an excerpt, from her July 12 column, on the former first daughter's $75,000 speaking fee:

There’s something unseemly about it, making one wonder: Why on earth is she worth that much money? Why, given her dabbling in management consulting, hedge-funding and coattail-riding, is an hour of her time valued at an amount that most Americans her age don’t make in a year? (Median household income in the United States is $53,046.)

If she really wants to be altruistic, let her contribute the money to some independent charity not designed to burnish the Clinton name as her mother ramps up to return to the White House and as she herself drops a handkerchief about getting into politics.

Or let her speak for free. After all, she is in effect going to candidate school. No need to get paid for it, too.

From the Scrapbook.

The Scrapbook scrupulously avoids Nazi analogies, such invidious comparisons being, almost exclusively, the province of the left. As strongly as The Scrapbook may feel about this or that, there is no politician in America remotely like Adolf Hitler, no program or proposal to compare with the Holocaust. And to suggest otherwise strikes The Scrapbook as not just absurd but outrageous—and insulting to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, the 60 million people who perished in World War II, not to mention the 416,837 Americans (including Republicans!) who died fighting the Axis.

Maureen Dowd weighs in today to decry the "Phony Mommy Wars" over Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen's attack on Ann Romney. I know what you're thinking: If anyone is qualified to call a cancer-survivor "phony" for her decision to stay at home and raise five boys—it's the author of Are Men Necessary? Aside from being nearly a week late weighing in on this controversy, the column seems to miss the mark about as badly as you might imagine:

Maureen Dowd screens “Fair Game,” the new Valerie Plame-Joe Wilson bio-pic, and gives us an account: if we are to rely upon her (a riskyish venture), the flick peddles a glammed-up Vanity-Fairy-tale of a damsel in distress defended against the forces of evil bravely if perhaps overbearingly by her manly husband/protector (oh, straight up the heart-fluttering MoDo alley).